Fannie and Freddie represent an economic subsidy from the public to middle & upper middle class

... middle-income homeowners."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129348144&sc=fb&cc=fp

Post-Mortgage Meltdown, Where Do We Go Now?

...But in light of the financial crisis and Fannie and Freddie's near-collapse, policy leaders are also rethinking the government's role — and many Americans are starting to question whether homeownership is the only path to the American Dream.

Fannie and Freddie function by buying, bundling and then stamping a government guarantee on mortgages. Then they sell them to investors. It keeps the banks happy because it keeps capital flowing, and it keeps consumers happy because it makes low, fixed-rate mortgages possible.
...
"As normal people everywhere in the country realized that housing prices seemed to be growing straight into the stratosphere, instead of becoming more conservative about lending against those ridiculously high values, Fannie and Freddie just continued to make the same kind of loans and indeed made more aggressive loans during that period of 2005, 2006, 2007," Date said. "And it has all come back to haunt them."
...

So instead of rationally-priced credit, he said, the country wound up with a $6 or $7 trillion bubble in housing values. And all of Wall Street and most of the country's banks made the same sort of mistakes, Date said.

Policy makers are at a bit of a crossroads, said Date, who was among a number of industry leaders who huddled with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner this week to figure out a new way forward on housing.

Fannie and Freddie have dramatically scaled back their level of aggressiveness in underwriting credit, Date said. But, he added, "the fact of the matter is that on average and over time, Fannie and Freddie represent an economic subsidy from the public at large to middle and upper middle-income homeowners."

Despite talk on Capitol Hill of dismantling the two organizations, it might be tough to get rid of them. That's because Fannie and Freddie, along with the Federal Housing Administration, are responsible for some 95 percent of the mortgages in the country today, Date said.

for former politicians who need a place to go to work a bit and get $ 10 million bonuses.